Switching Converter For EEPROM Programmer Taxes Solderless Breadboard

December 8, 2023 by Dan Maloney 13 Comments

We all know that solderless breadboards have their limitations. All that stray capacitance can play hell with circuits, especially high-speed stuff, but they’re so darn useful that avoiding them in favor of some other prototyping method can be really hard. So we often just forge ahead, plugging in our parts and hoping for the best

A recent veteran of the breadboard battle is [Anders Nielsen], who kicked off a new project by prototyping this high-voltage boost converter on a breadboard, with mixed results. The project is a scratch-built programmer for old-school ROM chips, a task normally farmed out to a dedicated programmer, but where’s the sport in that? Besides, this is the future, and generating the 12 to 14 volts needed should be a snap. And it would be, except for the fact that his chosen chip, a MIC2288 switching boost regulator, is only available in an SMD package. Getting the chip and a few other SMD support components onto breadboard-compatible breakouts proved to be challenging, and getting it working once it was there was even more work.

A lot of the trouble was down to simple breadboarding errors, but the big problem was the input capacitance, which [Anders] had to fiddle with quite a bit to get the converter to 14 volts. The current maxes out at about 25 mA before the voltage starts dropping, which just might be enough to burn those old chips, so we’ll call this a provisional win and see what happens when he builds the rest of the programmer.

[Anders]’ experience here raises a good question: what’s the best way to prototype using fussy SMD components? PCBs are cheap enough that it’s tempting to go straight to one, but swapping parts in and out like he had to do here to get everything just right would be much harder that way. We’re not sure we know the answer, but we’re pretty sure we’ll hear your thoughts on that in the comments section.

Continue reading “Switching Converter For EEPROM Programmer Taxes Solderless Breadboard” →

Check Your Board: Call For Submissions

December 8, 2023 by Arya Voronova 41 Comments

As both beginning hackers and Silicon Valley investors alike keep discovering, there are a lot of differences between hardware and software. One important difference is cost of iterating over a design. In software, you can comfortably rerun your build process and push updates out near instantly to tons of users. In hardware, all of that costs money, and I do mean, it costs way more money than you’d want to spend.

When I see people order boards that could never work because of some fundamental design assertions, with mistakes entirely preventable, it hurts. Not in an “embarrassment” way – it’s knowing that, if they asked someone to take a look at the design, they could’ve received crucial feedback, pulled the traces on the board differently or added some components, and avoided spending a significant chunk of money and time expecting and assembling a board that has a fundamental mishap.

Every thing like this might set a beginner back on their hacker journeys, or just have them spend some of their valuable time, and we can do a ton to prevent that by simply having someone experienced take a look.

Continue reading “Check Your Board: Call For Submissions” →

Hackaday Podcast Ep 247: Cameras From Gingerbread Or Hardboard, And The Insecurity Of Bluetooth

December 8, 2023 by Kristina Panos 9 Comments

This week, Editor-in-Chief Elliot Williams and Kristina Panos met up to discuss the best hacks of the previous week. We have no nerdy news this week, but is that necessarily a bad thing?

Speaking of nothingness, we have no winner for What’s That Sound because all six people who responded were wrong. Was the sound of Clippy too obscure?

But then it’s on to the hacks, beginning with an awesome autonomous excavator that, among other things, lays boulders algorithmically to build load-bearing walls without any mortar or cement. From there, it’s old school meets new school in the form of a laser-cut fox-wedged mortise and tenon joint. We take a look at a couple of simple cameras, making dry ice from seashells, and a really tiny POV display where everything spins. Finally, we talk about how small that proposed Italian lunar outpost is, and discuss whether rating airlines would help stop the spread of diseases.

Check out the links below if you want to follow along, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!

Download and savor at your leisure.

Continue reading “Hackaday Podcast Ep 247: Cameras From Gingerbread Or Hardboard, And The Insecurity Of Bluetooth” →

DIY Walkie-Talkie With ESP32 And ESP-NOW

December 8, 2023 by Maya Posch 15 Comments

In a recent article in Elektor magazine, [Clemens Valens] describes the construction and software for an ESP32 walkie-talkie system that uses ESP-NOW for the wireless connection between units, along with a low-cost condenser microphone with a transistor-based preamplifier and an LM386 op-amp for the speaker circuit. In the ESP32 module the built-in DAC and ADC are used for audio in and output, which provide just about enough resolution for voice communication.

So why use ESP-NOW rather than WiFi or Bluetooth? Mostly because of range, power usage and convenience with no SSIDs and passwords to bother with.

The DIY Walkie-Talkie circuit diagram. (Credit: Clemens Valens, Elektor magazine)

ESP-NOW is Espressif’s own network protocol that uses the same underlying hardware as 2.4 GHz WiFi and Bluetooth, but focuses on more basic direct and mesh-style communication. It can be considered to be somewhat like low-level UDP with MAC address instead of IP address, which makes it useful for fire-and-forget traffic such as from IoT devices.

In the past, we’ve seen ESP-NOW control everything from fake security cameras to CNC machines. In fact, we’ve even seen it used in another walkie-talkie a couple years back.

This Week In Security: LogoFail, National DNS Poison, And DNA

December 8, 2023 by Jonathan Bennett 3 Comments

When there’s a vulnerability in a system library, we install updates, and go on with our lives. When there’s a vulnerability in a Java library, jars get rebuilt, and fixed builds slowly roll out. But what happens when there’s a vulnerability in a library used in firmware builds? And to make it even more fun, it’s not just a single vulnerability. All three major firmware vendors have problems when processing malicious images. And LogoFail isn’t limited to x86, either. UEFI Arm devices are vulnerable, too.
Continue reading “This Week In Security: LogoFail, National DNS Poison, And DNA” →

The Latest John Deere Repair Lawsuit Now Has The Go-Ahead

December 8, 2023 by Jenny List 50 Comments

Long time readers will have followed the twists and turns of the John Deere repair saga, in which the agricultural machinery manufacturer has used DRM to restrict the repair of its tractors. It may be hot stuff on the prairies, but it matters to everyone because it’s a key right-to-repair battleground. Now the company’s attempt to throw out the latest class-action lawsuit, this time in Illinois. has failed, paving the way for a meaningful challenge.

This lawsuit is special because has the aim of determining whether or not Deere conspired to drive up the cost of repair and edge out independent mechanics. It comes against a backdrop in which their promised access to repair software which we reported on back in January has failed to materialize, and this is likely to figure as an act of bad faith.

A failing of corporate culture is that the organisation can in its own eyes, never be wrong. In Deere’s case they have accrued plenty of bad publicity in the years they’ve pursued this ill-advised business model, and in case that weren’t enough they’ve alienated their core customers out on the farms to the extent that a second-hand Deere from before the DRM era has more value than its newer counterparts. Deere genuinely do make very good tractors, so for farmers loyal for generations to turn their backs on them is a very significant story indeed. One has to ask, how much bad publicity and how many lawsuits do they have to have before someone at head office in Moline figures out that DRM in tractors (or anything else for that matter) isn’t the great idea they once thought it was? Maybe this one will finally herald the moment when that happens.

Header image: Nheyob / CC BY-SA 4.0

Festive PCB Gives The Gift Of Hacking

December 8, 2023 by Kristina Panos 9 Comments

‘Tis the season for gift giving, and what better to give than a newfound love for hacking, soldering, and blinkenlights? In order to spread cheer and education at the local hackerspace, [Tom Goff] created this festive tree circuit board that can either sit in a stand to be admired, or worn as jewelry. The resistors are even designed to look like candy canes hanging from the boughs.

The brains of this festive little tree is an ATmega328P, which you probably recognize as the microcontroller that powers the Arduino Uno. Although this circuit has none of the extra bits you’d find on an Uno, not even a crystal oscillator, it can still be programmed with Arduino and use the 8 MHz internal clock.

[Tom] has provided good, thorough instructions, especially for the sticky bit of setting up the IDE to program using the 8 MHz internal clock. So even if you’re nowhere near Norwich Hackerspace, you can join in the fun. Be sure to check out the video after the break, wherein [Tom] walks through designing the PCB using Inkscape and Fritzing.

Want to whip up a little something for the hackerspace wall? Check out this Sierpinski Christmas tree.

Continue reading “Festive PCB Gives The Gift Of Hacking” →